


Your Sweet Time

by Wordplaysam



Category: Animorphs - Katherine A. Applegate
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-03
Updated: 2018-04-03
Packaged: 2019-04-18 00:23:45
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,498
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14200891
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Wordplaysam/pseuds/Wordplaysam
Summary: Seventy years after the disappearance of her fellow Animorphs, Cassie is invited to watch the interview of four young men claiming to be her long-lost friends.





	Your Sweet Time

I was halfway between Auckland and Los Angeles when I realized that my granddaughter wasn’t with me. I didn’t know how I could have left her behind. Hadn’t we both gone to sleep on a cot in the Maori school I’d been asked to attend the opening of? Surely she’d been woken up by the summons, too. To be quite honest, I wasn’t even entirely sure how I’d gotten on the plane. Had she put me on it and said she’d catch up?

That must have been it. Except why hadn’t she come on the plane with me? I must have left her.

Tobias would be angry. “Mama,” he’d say, taking my hands and bending to my level. “We hired Maria to help you.” He’d say _help_ in a way that was slightly condescending. He’d had that mannerism since childhood, but it had taken on a new level since his father had passed and he’d taken over managing my finances.

Oh, but…

But…Tobias was…

Dead. Tobias was dead. The grief of losing a child washed over me again. My younger son, Walt, had been the one to arrange hiring my daughter’s daughter to help me after Tobias’ heart attack, three years ago. He’d been only sixty-two. How could I have forgotten that?

_Damn_ dementia. Walt and Rachel often used that word over my head, when they thought I wasn’t listening, like I couldn’t hear them and didn’t know what it meant. I had doubts that it actually affected me. But what did it mean that Tobias’ former secretary had to explain to me several times a day that I couldn’t call his office for legal advice anymore?

The thought occupied me all the way to the government holding facility, even through my briefing. They ushered me through the building, down the hall to a room. I raised a hand to grasp the door handle, but the guard stopped me. She was young and crisp, every hair smoothed into place under the blue and green cap of the Earth Liberation Army--we were already liberated, of course, but the intra-Earth forces had nonetheless been named for a joke of Marco’s long ago. She smiled warmly. “Allow me, Ambassador,” she said, pushing open the door.

“Thank you,” I said as I hobbled past her into the room. I had half a mind to be embarrassed about my slowness, so without really thinking about it, I morphed. No one even blinked as my skin lightened, my hair turned blonde, and I became smooth with youth. My mind cleared a bit, though not all the way, and I appreciated the looseness in my joints. 

I had turned into a form I had acquired so long ago, thirteen-year-old Rachel. I bowed my head in silent prayer for her, and when I was finished, the ELA guard, the woman who’d opened the door, brought me a head set. “You’ll be able to listen to the microphones in the room. If you wish to speak to me, your microphone is connected to my earpiece,” she said, touching her ear.

She crossed the room to a door on a wall otherwise filled with a large window of one-way glass. She touched the door handle and paused. “Do you…” she asked, looking back to me. “Do you think this is all a hoax?”

“I hope it’s not.” But there was no way on Heaven or Earth it could be true.

“Me, too,” she said. “But if it’s a joke, it’s an awful one.”

“Horrible,” I agreed. And yet, the fact that I was even asked to be here for this made me inclined to think that the ELA thought these boys were telling the truth. The ELA respected me, but they’re not known for being tolerant. So if they really thought they were dealing with some morph-capable terrorists, they would have simply tortured them and not bothered to wake me.

She exited through the door. There were other guards in the room, including a man I thought I recognized as the Homeworld Security Commander. But it was hard to tell. It was unnerving how much he looked like my late husband, and surely I would have noticed that before. The young woman took a place in the corner. 

And then they were let in.

There were six of them. I didn’t know two of the people in restraints: a man and a woman. But even though I’d been briefed on the other four, even though I knew it _couldn’t_ be true, it took my breath away to see them. Tears sprang to my eyes. Two humans, an Andalite, and a hawk.

I squeezed my eyes shut, but when I opened them, the boys were still there. Home finally after seventy years away and looking like they hadn’t aged a year. Marco. Ax. Tobias.

And Jake.

It seemed impossible. It had to be impossible. They had to be _frolis_ artists, actors skilled in recreating the images of famous people from snatches of recombined DNA. I’d met fine _frolis_ artists before—even one who played such a convincing Marco that his stand-up routine had me crying with laughter. 

But that didn’t explain the way that the boys were the clearest people in the room. Everyone else was hazy around the edges, just like the way the rest of my memories always seemed fuzzy compared to ones made during those three Animorph years. That wasn’t a symptom of aging—my emotions had been so sharp then, so intense.

“Take them to the next room,” the Commander said, pointing to the unknown pair, and they were led out. Marco’s eyes followed the woman as she left. Was this another of his crushes, or was there something there? Jake and Tobias both pointedly looked elsewhere, and the woman turned one last time to look at Marco.

When the other two were gone, the guards removed their restraints: hand and ankle cuffs, Tobias’ jesses, and a tail restraint on Ax. They led them to chairs. Marco and Jake sat, Tobias perched on the back of one, and Ax stood. 

“When your obsolete Yeerk fighter tried to pass Saturn, a facial and vocal recognition program matched your identities to records for four of the six Animorphs,” the Commander said.

“We _are_ four of the six Animorphs,” Jake said. He sounded weary, but then again Jake always sounded weary. It was a funny feeling, looking at him and trying to juxtapose the way I remembered feeling about him with the fact that now it seemed like he was barely out of diapers at what, nineteen? Twenty?

“She isn’t obsolete,” Marco said. Of course he would notice one tiny word. “The _Rachel_ is top of the line. Experimental, even.” I hoped they’d be that loyal to me.

“Nevertheless, the Earth Liberation Army thought that the match was significant, and so you’ve been taken into custody until your identities can be determined. The results of these tests may be used to try you on several counts of improper spacecraft maneuvering and entering protected Human airspace,” the Commander said. “As well as _frolis_ impersonation with the intent to commit unlawful acts.” I could hear the distaste in his voice for what he must have thought of as ultimate blasphemy. The decision to call me must have come from over his head.

“Do we get a lawyer?” Marco asked brightly. “I’ve got a good one.”

“You are in the custody of the Earth Liberation Army,” the Commander replied, clearly a ‘no.’ “Sergeant, if you will?”

A guard lifted a clipboard and read it. “State your full name, date of birth, and social security number,” the guard said to Jake. Jake complied, as did Marco, and Ax gave some sort of Andalite serial number that might have been associated with the military. When the guard got to Tobias was when we started to have difficulty. He didn’t say his middle name, but the guard pretended not to notice. But then he faltered. < Uh— >

“Oh, come on,” Marco said. “Tobias can no more give his social security number than I can name all five Backstreet Boys.” The Commander looked like he was ready to convict them right there, but I was becoming more convinced by the minute.

“He’s right,” I said into my microphone. “We’d know we had an imposter if he _had_ given us a number.”

Tobias’ body jerked visibly and his feathers puffed up. Marco and Jake were on their feet almost instantly at this sign of—pain? Distress? Had he heard me? Ax tensed his tail. A guard in the corner drew a gun on them, but he was only one gun on four people, and he kept shifting his aim. They were all a little trigger happy, I guess. Men.

< It’s okay, > Tobias said. His feathers went down. < I just heard—I just thought I heard something. Nevermind. > Marco and Jake sat again, and the guard lowered his gun. Ax remained tense.

My guard, the woman, was the only one who still seemed relaxed. She touched her earpiece. “Sir,” she said. “The Ambassador says we anticipated he wouldn’t know it.”

The boys were silent for a moment. They had to know the mirror before them was one-way. I assumed they were listening to Ax or Tobias. Jake’s lips moved slightly, but I couldn’t hear what he said. Another moment, and then he lifted his head to look at the Commander. “You said we would be tested. When do we begin?” Jake asked.

“We’ll begin now,” said the Commander, and motioned to the female guard. She approached Jake and held her hand to his cheek. 

“You’re acquiring me,” he mumbled.

But she was already changing, bulking up. Her hair turned brown, her jaw more masculine, and by the time Jake looked alert again, there were two of them. “The morph is complete, Sir,” she said with his voice. “This is his acquirable form.”

So they weren’t _frolis_ artists, unless they’d taken the ultimate step for this prank and become _nothlits_. They seemed too sane for that—as sane as the boys had ever been, at least. So could it be a hallucination? I’d never had hallucinations before, and certainly not in this body.

“You may demorph.”

The acquiring process was completed with the others, and then the tables turned. They were asked to morph, one at a time, an exhausting array of all of the animals we’d acquired over the years. Battle and bird morphs to be sure, but plenty of less obvious choices as well. Raccoons and seagulls, lobsters and specific Hork-Bajir and Homer and Euclid and Champ. 

They could morph, so unless they’d made a deal with the Ellimist or the Crayak, they weren’t _nothlits_. What’s more, they passed every test. Every morph had been accurate, right down to Marco’s wolf being female, which was a story I was pretty sure he never told anyone.

Did that mean they had to be…real?

As much as I didn’t want to believe it, as much as rationality was screaming at me not to be a crazy old lady, I was starting to believe. Truth be told, there was something in my soul that had believed from the very start, some primal part of me that had recognized them. I hadn’t really been thinking of them as imposters.

Tobias had to morph human, and he walked right up to the mirror and pressed his nose against it. He glared as only Tobias could, no less intense in human form, almost as though he were challenging me. God, those eyes. They couldn’t be fake.

And so it continued, until the list came back around to Marco. 

“Ant,” the Sergeant said, his pen poised over the clipboard. I tensed. There was only one way Marco—the real one—would respond to that.

“No,” Marco said. I let go of my breath. “Fuck this stupid test! Do you know who I am?!”

< I believe you told him at the beginning of the interview, > Ax said.

Marco gave him a dirty look, and then swung to face the mirror. “Why are you keeping us here?” he demanded. “I get it. You wanted to make sure we weren’t in morph. But fine, we passed that test. Now let us go, Mr. Ambassador, whoever you are.”

< The Ambassador is a woman, > Tobias said. < I can hear her through the earpiece. She sounds like Rachel. That’s what I thought I heard. Rachel’s voice. >

Done.

“I’d like to speak to them, privately,” I said.

My guard cleared her throat. “She wants us to leave the room.”

The guards all left. When the room was clear, I opened the door between our rooms and walked in.

Tobias let out a soft sigh of breath. Jake, too, looked stunned. I was beautiful. I was Rachel. 

Instantly, I realized that using Rachel’s body was wildly improper in this situation: they weren’t from the same world as me anymore, where anyone can look like anything. Where using the faces of the dead is seen as deeply respectful, so long as it is done without ill intent. 

They didn’t know this. As much has I had been judging them by minute actions, I had overlooked this important distinction. All they’d know is that they’d been tricked, for I couldn’t pass for Rachel. There was no fierceness in my—in her—eyes, and I was so young. In this morph, I looked younger than the rest of them, regressed even past the way she looked the day she died. 

And, oh, I remembered fighting so young, but here, standing before these boys in a thirteen-year-old body, I could hardly believe we had done it. We had been children.

If I’d been trying to fool them, I would have gone to Tobias. We all remembered her final words. Instead, I crossed the room to Jake. I knelt at his feet, and I was crying as I raised a hand to cup his cheek.

“Welcome home, Jake,” I said through my tears. I looked at the others in turn. “All of you. My boys. Welcome home.” In this moment, one for so long I had hoped and prayed for, I wasn’t ashamed to cry.

“You’re not Rachel,” Marco said. 

< There is something entirely unRachel about this strange look-a-like. I feel it in…in my hearts, > Ax said, deadpan and yet uncharacteristically emotional.

“This is some trick.,” Marco agreed. I couldn’t do this anymore.

I took her hand from Jake’s cheek and stood. “You’re right,” I said. “I’m not Rachel. But you have no idea how much I wish she were with you, too.”

< What is this about? > Tobias demanded. < What kind of sick joke is this?! > He had puffed himself up again, his wings tense and half-spread.

“No joke. No trick,” I said. “It’s not considered disrespectful to morph the dead anymore. Every time I use her body, I honor her memory. And I didn’t want to startle you at first with what I am.”

< Who are you? > Ax asked.

But Jake knew the answer. “Cassie,” he said, my name catching in his throat. “You acquired Rachel once, near the beginning.”

I looked at him and smiled. “Yes,” I said.

“So what are you talking about? What are you?” he asked.

“Old,” I replied. I motioned toward the chair that Tobias was perched on the back of. “May I?” I asked.

He grumbled, but shifted enough so that I took it as a yes. I sat in the chair, and my demorph began. 

Growing old hadn’t bothered me as a graceful, gradual process, but it was a different matter entirely to think about how quickly I was going to age in front of these boys. My face started to reconstruct itself from one girl to another, and for just an instant, I looked as I had been, at thirteen. But it was like time-lapse photography. I shrank into myself.

“See?” I asked. “Maybe you can see why I preferred Rachel.” My voice always sounded softer to me nowadays, muffled almost.

“What happened to you?” Jake asked. “A year ago—”

“Jake, the last time I saw you, when you came to ask me about Tobias? That was over seventy years ago.”

Marco gasped.

< How is that possible? > Tobias asked. < A year for us, seventy for you… >

“What exactly happened out there?” I asked. “Could you be caught in a _sario_ rip?”

“I don’t think so,” Jake replied. “We did ram a Blade ship, and I don’t remember what the explosion was like, none of us do, but besides our blackout, there was no rip in time. We rescued Ax---” His eyes were guarded, so I knew there was more to the story, but I didn’t press, “and then Marco drove us home.”

“You let Marco drive?” I joked.

“You haven’t seen us in seventy years and already you’re ragging my driving?” Marco asked. “Yes, they let me drive. With Menderash dead and Ax recovering, most of the piloting fell to me. It wasn’t easy—our Z-Space engine had been disabled in the battle, so we had to go the long way.”

Ax’s stalk eyes swung to look at Marco. < Your course for Earth— > he began. 

“Straight here,” Marco said. “Maximum burn.”

Ax groaned. < No, > he said. < Please inform me this is one of your human jests. >

“Going with that reaction, I’m going to say I wish it was.”

< Relativity! > Ax yelled. He said an extremely impolite, if archaic, Andalite curse, followed by < —human! You can’t _do_ that! When you move faster than light in conventional space, time changes! It went quickly within the field of the ship, but at a normal rate everywhere else.  >

“Oh,” Marco said.

“We’re never letting you drive again,” Jake said weakly. “I mean it this time.” No one laughed.

If there had been any doubt in my mind, it was long forgotten. Seventy years, and our rapport was the same. Though victims of relativity, here my brothers in arms, home at last. We had so much to catch up on, so much business to attend to. They’d be entitled to a division of the substantial trust that their mothers and I started for the royalties from the books and movie rights. My husband, always financially savvy, could help us. He’d want to meet them. My children would want to meet them. 

“Let’s get you out of here,” I said. Marco and Jake stood first, and I followed. To my credit, I didn’t struggle to my feet, but it did take me some time to rise. “May I…” I began, slightly embarrassed. “May I have an arm?”

Jake extended it to me, of course. It was a strange feeling, being next to him like this. He had always been much bigger than me, but the differences were so pronounced now. He was twenty, tall and strong, and I was like a moth, fragile. Our progress to the door was slow. 

“The ELA already told me that they would let you go if you passed both their test and mine, although they may send a detachment to follow us. They’re cautious, but they’re also close-lipped. We may be able to keep you from the media for a little while.”

“Wait,” Marco said. “We can’t just leave. Not without Jeanne and Santorelli.” The other two, no doubt.

I looked up at Jake. “Some of yours?” I asked.

“Six is the perfect number,” Jake replied.

< Will this turn into a fight, or will these future Earth forces allow them to go? > Ax inquired.

“Being me has its benefits,” I said. I could ask the President to allow me to dance though the halls of the White House with underwear on my head. He would agree, _and_ the Universal Press would find a way to make the story positive. “The ELA will grant your friends their freedom, if I ask.”

“Then let’s go,” Marco said, and tried the handle. It was locked, so he rapped his knuckles against the door, but no answer. “Hey, security guy! Old Lady Cassie says we check out!” he called.

The door swung open. 

It led straight to the outside. Had it looked like that when they’d been let in? I thought the door had been an interior one, but then again, I was having trouble remembering what I’d eaten for breakfast that morning.

We walked onto the street. It was dark out, and the stars looked so bright, brighter than I’d ever seen them before. A light streaked across the sky. It was a shooting star—it slowed, and seemed to be headed for a landing not far from us. As we stood there, transfixed by the sight, I felt something stirring within me.

< That star, > Tobias murmured. < We have to find it. >

I knew exactly what he meant. I felt the same desire, even if I didn’t know why. We took off running.

I hadn’t run—in this body—in years, but I was doing it. Without pain, without stumbling. It was like being with my friends made my heart remember what it was like to be younger. The ELA building had been in the heart of Los Angeles, but every street we turned down seemed more and more like San Diego. I even thought I saw Jake’s home in a flash of suburbia.

As we ran down a quiet stretch of driveway that reminded me of the one leading to my parents’ old barn, a child rode past us on a bicycle, and I spun as he passed. “Tobias?” I asked, but the boy was gone.

< What? > Tobias—not mine—asked.

“No, the boy. I thought for a second it was another Tobias—my son.” Silly. It couldn’t have been him. If Tobias had been playing on his Grandma’s driveway, Rachel wouldn’t have been far behind.

“You named a kid after him?” Marco asked. “Seriously?”

“About half the boys in the hospital were already named Marco,” I replied. Of course, that was before Tobias had been adopted as the _de facto_ patron saint of the Intergalactic Association of _Nothlits_. Not to mention his Messiah status among the Hork-Bajir. These days, Tobias’ memory surpassed Marco’s and even me in popularity.

The star continued to hang in the sky, though it dipped closer to the horizon. We continued to chase it. We passed the edge of a forest and a mall, and finally we jumped a chain link fence into—into a construction site. The construction site where we’d begun.

Tobias landed on the ground beside us, and suddenly he was human. No morphing, no flash. He looked at his hands, and at that moment I realized that I, too, had changed. My skin was unlined, and my hair was dark again. But I hadn’t morphed. I wasn’t in someone else’s body. I was in mine, only younger. 

Was I wrong before? _Was_ this all a hallucination? A new stage of dementia?

Did the boys look a little younger, too?

“Look,” Tobias said, pointing at the star. “It’s slowing down.”

< Its trajectory will end here, > Ax said.

“Are we getting a redo of our first night?” Marco asked. “Should we go into battle morphs?”

“No,” Jake said, lifting a hand to reassure Marco. He was calm, steady. Jake the leader. “This is something else.”

I could feel everything else becoming distant. Memories of my adult life, memories that I had slowly been losing finally broke free and floated away. As Animorphs, like the naïve teenagers we were, we thought that we had experienced every emotion possible. But we had been wrong—they’d missed so much. I could remember the joy of raising children, the sweetness of growing old beside my husband, my partner, the sorrow of becoming a widow. But the details were becoming harder to remember by the second. 

It was heartbreaking.

Yet… 

I loved my family so deeply, so honestly. But a part of me had died when I was twenty, and here it was again. My memories of being an Animorph were still as painfully, beautifully clear as when I’d made them. “This is home,” I said. “Us, together again.”

The star landed. 

“Rachel,” Tobias said. And there she was, slowly picking herself off of the ground. It was really her—I knew it just as deeply as I had with the boys. Sixteen. Still gorgeous, even after falling from the sky. Tobias ran to her, and it was hard to tell where she ended and he began. Finally, they parted, and he laughed, a sound I hadn’t heard since before our final battle. They were still holding hands.

We all took turns hugging her, but Jake, being Jake, still needed details. “What is going on?” he asked. “How did you get here?”

“As I’d often suspected,” Marco said, “Rachel fell from Heaven.”

“I don’t think I fell _from_ Heaven,” she said. “I think I fell _to_ it. Or, I don’t know, something like it. I don’t know. You guys know I’m not very religious. But this feels…I don’t know what it feels like.”

< What are you trying to say? > Ax asked.

“I’m…” She paused, looking troubled. Tobias squeezed her hand as she swallowed and started over. “The last thing I remember was dying. I’m dead, guys. I’m definitely dead.”

“We know,” Tobias said, softly.

“But if you’re dead,” Marco said, “then what about us?” He paused. “Oh.”

We all got it at the same moment. My memory gaps—the shifting landscape. Rachel knowing she was dead. The boys remembering a suicide mission, but not how they survived the moment of impact. I was old, so old.

“Did the Ellimist bring us here?” I asked. “Or is this proof of…”

***

She’d passed on in her sleep, a peaceful death, which everyone agreed was poetic. The memorial service lasted for days. The press coverage continued even longer, and it seemed like all of the people of the universe came together to mourn the death of Cassie Adams—former Earth Ambassador to the Andalite Homeworld, architect of the Hork-Bajir resettlement, peace mediator and animal rights activist and humanitarian. The Last Animorph.

But despite the massive universal mourning, the group that assembled on the private orbital platform was small. A man and a woman, alone, without even their children.

“I wish Dad and ‘Bias could be here,” Walter Adams murmured as he turned to his sister. She was crying, and he put an arm around her shoulders. 

“It’s hard to believe we’re the last ones left,” Rachel said, staring out a window at the Earth rotating below them. “I wish we didn’t have to let her go.”

“But this is what she wanted: ending up in space, finally joining her friends,” he replied.

“I know,” Rachel said, sighed. “Let’s do it.” Walt pressed the button, and they watched as their mother’s ashes drifted away into space. 

The light of the sun caught them, and, for a moment, it was difficult to distinguish her remains from the stars.


End file.
